


peering out for a look at the hidden sun

by inmylife



Category: (여자)아이들 | (G)-Idle
Genre: Boats and Ships, Hopeful Ending, Post-Apocalypse, Rain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-15 21:28:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14798298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inmylife/pseuds/inmylife
Summary: he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly.or, one day it starts raining and never stops.





	peering out for a look at the hidden sun

**Author's Note:**

> is this really the first work in the idle tag
> 
> title from all summer in a day by ray bradbury. terrible story but theres a lot of rain in it.

Soyeon was seven when the rain started. 

 

One morning, she woke up and it was raining. This in itself wasn’t weird. It rained sometimes; that was just what the sky did. Rain wasn’t anything foreign. Rain was… rain. 

 

What was weird was when it didn’t stop after three days. 

 

This was when Soyeon’s mother started to worry. This was when she called up her sister in China and told Soyeon and her brother to pack their things because they were moving. The Korean Peninsula wasn’t safe enough anymore. 

 

Seoul is an island, now. You can still get into the skyscrapers if you try. 

 

There were other Korean families in China, and families from Japan and Thailand and Vietnam and Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia, even one girl named Sofia from a string of tiny Russian islands. Families from Taiwan, and China’s coastal cities. There were whole countries inside Chongqing, or at least that’s how it felt to Soyeon, almost eight years old with the world falling down around her. 

 

It rained the whole car ride to Seoul, it rained for the entirety of the turbulent flight into Beijing, rained as Soyeon’s mother drove with Soyeon and Wonwoo bickering in the backseat to her sister’s apartment in the rich district of Chongqing. It rained as Soyeon and Wonwoo were enrolled in a school for Koreans in the penthouse of someone else’s apartment. It rained for the next twelve years and it’s still raining and it hasn’t stopped. 

 

Chongqing was too small for Soyeon, too cramped, too many people shoved into too little space. So she built a boat. She wasn’t the first - Wonwoo had done it himself, with two Chinese natives and nine other Koreans and an unfortunate American boy who’d gotten trapped in the Eastern Hemisphere on a vacation. His boat was big. Soyeon’s was small. She had enough room in her heart for five other people, and it was the same in her boat. 

 

Seo Soojin wasn’t the only other Korean girl her age in Chongqing, but she was the only one Soyeon liked. Soojin was quiet but not a pushover, and she was talented and strong and oddly funny at the best of times. Soyeon liked her, mostly because Soyeon liked leading and Soojin was a good follower. 

 

Eunbin had come with them too, a younger girl, brash and brave and bold just like Soyeon. Kwon Eunbin was Soyeon’s first friend in Chongqing, but she left Soyeon for someone else’s boat, simple and easy, because at the end of the day Eunbin would always choose Tingyan over her. 

 

It was the day after Eunbin left that they came upon Miyeon, treading water. 

 

Miyeon was a good swimmer, had been on track to go pro back before the rain. She hadn’t stopped swimming in the years since, swimming in pools and in lakes where she could find some. This saved her, because the five girls on her rowboat were running out of food and someone had to get off. Soyeon decided then and there that she would never have this problem. She and Yuqi and Minnie and Soojin were good at catching fish, and some Vietnamese immigrants had joined forces with Chinese women to reinvent rice farming in the new landscape. The rice women loved Soyeon’s boat because Soyeon and her girls were always willing to do the heavy lifting after their husbands left for the mountains or Africa or the Midwest or anywhere else above water. 

 

Yuqi had come from the ruins of Beijing when Soyeon was twelve. She was ditzy and pretty, but a hard worker, and Soyeon respected her. Soyeon would never admit she had a soft spot for the girl, but why else did she let Yuqi insist her way onto her boat that night almost a year ago now? 

 

(If anyone asked - which most people didn’t - Soyeon says that Yuqi is useful because she speaks the best Chinese. Sometimes, she adds that Yuqi is their pretty face. Yuqi just laughs and tells Soyeon she loves her.) 

 

Minnie - resourceful, speaks four languages, tall - is Miyeon’s ultimate partner in crime and Soyeon’s right hand girl. Minnie is a favorite among the rice women because she speaks Thai still, fluently, even after years and years in China with only four other Thai kids in their little enclave, and to the South Asian women barely getting by in Chinese and longing for a piece of home, Minnie is a welcome breath of air and a reminder that all is not lost. 

 

Soyeon loves Minnie for a lot more than that. Minnie is mother and father and loving caring unnie all in one, the older sister Soyeon never had and who she needed all the more in the three years alone in her house after Wonwoo left and her mother started sleeping in other people’s bedrooms. 

 

Yeh Shuhua came to Korea on a raft with two other Taiwanese kids. The raft flipped in a particularly bad wave and their oldest, Tzuyu, was washed away. Shuhua and Guanlin held each other tight after that, and Soyeon kept both of them with her for a while when she and the other four found them clinging to the ruined pillars of the 63 Building. Guanlin left with a boat full of older boys, most of whom Soyeon recognized and so trusted, but Shuhua stayed. 

 

Shuhua speaks bad Korean and is a naturally quiet person. She mostly talks to Yuqi and occasionally Minnie. Rarely to Soyeon. This saddens Soyeon a little, but she understands. Soyeon is scary, naturally so, the same way Yuqi is naturally sweet and Minnie is naturally welcoming. 

 

They are Soyeon’s girls. Where she leads, they will follow. That is how it’s been since Soyeon pushed her boat off the Three Gorges Museum in the dead of night a year ago, and that’s how it’s been since. 

 

They bump into another boat. Soyeon recognizes Jo Jinho from home. Real home - Incheon. He had babysat her. He’s just as short as she remembers. Then again, she’s short too. 

 

There are ten boys on Jinho’s boat. It has a more substantial roof than Soyeon’s and a small space for growing rice. Their leader, Hwitaek, tells Soyeon they have a farmer on board. Soyeon wonders and wonders until the bleach-blond, tattooed, sickly-looking boy comes out to the deck of the boat (it’s a nice enough boat that they have a deck, and Soyeon is envious) and falls into Hwitaek’s arms with a grace that’s almost easy. They’re the same height and they smile at each other for a solid five seconds before Hwitaek remembers himself and introduces his boyfriend to Soyeon as the rice grower. Soyeon bargains with Hwitaek and gets some rice in exchange for some fabric that Miyeon has somehow figured out how to weave from the bits of seaweed and wicker and rags that float at the top of the water. Then they leave. 

 

It has been an hour when they hear someone crying. Sobbing. Someone saying, “hyung, come back”. 

 

Soyeon freezes. She turns and meets Minnie’s eyes. 

 

“Soojin,” Minnie shouts, “try and steer us to the voice.” 

 

Soojin is good with the boat. She should be - she helped Soyeon build it. She had taken navigation classes and studied physics and spent hours outside in the rain with her hands in the water learning the way the currents flow. Soojin meddles with the boat, and the cries come closer. 

 

It’s a boy. His voice isn’t quite changed yet, but even from the distance Soyeon can see he’s tall. His face is round, still, like a child’s. Who abandoned him? 

 

Yuqi, with her heart big enough to love the world, is the first off the boat, swimming cleanly over to the boy. He’s clinging to a piece of cardboard or wood or something that isn’t enough to keep a person afloat. He’s swimming. He looks exhausted. 

 

Yuqi grabs him, then Soyeon jumps in to help her, and they pull the boy between them until they reach the boat and Soojin reaches down to help them in. Shuhua is waiting with one of Miyeon’s blankets, and they wrap the boy in it to help warm him as they pull him under the roof. 

 

His name is Seonho. He had been on a boat with his parents and cousin but one night his parents were left, so he relied on his older cousin for everything. It worked like this for months until Minho had decided he would be better off on his own. 

 

Yuqi asks Soyeon if they can keep him. Soyeon refers her to Soojin and Miyeon, who are making plans to get back to Hwitaek’s boat. 

 

Seonho falls asleep in Soyeon’s lap. Soyeon does not want to be a mother, nor does she have any motherly tendencies whatsoever, but she enjoys it, oddly, the feeling of this overgrown child’s weight on her legs and against her chest. He is skinny, most people are thin now but the contrast of his frame against Soyeon’s is stark. She has a sinking feeling that if she set food in front of him, he’d eat like someone was going to take it away. She focuses on him so hard it seems like even the rain quiets, the white noise she’s grown used to in the thirteen years of nonstop pouring water ebbing to make room for her concern. 

 

He shivers the whole hour and a half it takes to get back to Hwitaek. Soyeon rubs a hand up and down his back. She doesn’t know if it helps. 

 

Jinho cradles Seonho close from the moment Soyeon explains the situation, despite their five inch height difference. Soyeon catches Hyunggu and Soojin trading smiles in her periphery. Yuqi has found her match in Hwitaek’s Chinese sunshine Yan An. Minnie leans over Hyojong’s shoulder and he teaches her about rice. 

 

They will have to come back, she thinks. Six girls can’t live alone on a boat forever. 

 

When Soyeon looks at the sky, she thinks she can see the sun. 

**Author's Note:**

> it's been raining a lot here recently so i guess i just wondered what would happen if it never stopped
> 
> some kind of ray bradbury-noah's ark fusion
> 
> yell at me on tumblr (zhengkis) or twitter (missyehana)!


End file.
